


Displacement

by primeideal



Category: Blade Runner (Movies)
Genre: Canon-Typical Gore, Gen, Surprisingly Canon Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-10 06:09:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14731413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/primeideal/pseuds/primeideal
Summary: Rachael lives. Things change, except for all the ways that they don't.





	Displacement

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Marie_L](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marie_L/gifts).



> Thanks to prinzenhasserin for betaing!
> 
> Includes some characters from the "2022: Blackout" short movie, but should work if you haven't seen that.

_1\. having been moved, especially forcibly moved from one’s homeland_

Rachael lies under Sapper’s nervous, expectant gaze, and pain sears through her. Surely this agony is not what defines humankind? She screams, and for once Sapper does not glare her into silence. They are alone in his remote house.

Alone, except for the life coming to be.

“You’re nearly there,” Sapper says, far too calm for the circumstances. “Just hold on, you’re all right.”

She has never felt less all right. Not fleeing for her life, not discovering that she was forged in Tyrell’s laboratories, not even taking in the shock, redoubled in Rick’s face, of what her body could do. Replicants are made of sterner stuff than ordinary humans, she knows; they can endure gunfire and falls, contortions and manipulations. How can a human, even without a timer on their life, survive this?

She yells again, and this time, another bloody, crying body echoes her back.

“Oh,” she breathes. Her child is alive and whole, wailing as if it already senses the injustices of the world, despite its blank slate.

“Congratulations,” says Sapper. He rarely smiles, but his voice rings with the most contentment she’s heard in months. “May I?”

“Please,” says Rachael, still sore.

He reaches down to the emergency blanket and gently picks up the baby, who, if anything, screams even louder. Looks it over, pokes at its knees. Did he learn this in one of his books? Surely his off-world combat training could never have prepared him for this.

“She’s very healthy,” he says, and this time there is a smile. “A girl.”

A human. She had _never_ been that small, that vulnerable.

Sapper carries the baby over to a pot of warm water on the stove and rinses her off, drying her with a dishcloth. “Here you are. She’ll be ready to feed soon, I’m told.”

Rachael shifts awkwardly. Her chest had grown along with her stomach as the child grew within her, but none of them know what she will and won’t be able to accomplish. As far as they know, she’s in a sample size of her own, though Sapper documents her in secret as best he can.

She takes off her shirt—she has no secrets from Sapper, hasn’t for weeks now—and reaches out for her daughter, holding her close to her chest. The baby screams, still, but turns towards her, grasping for milk. As if even humans come with knowledge programmed in.

Emotion begins to return to her, exhaustion mingled with relief. She is still a fugitive, a unique creation, yet the physical ordeal is over, and she has a new companion to share the journey with. She sees neither Rick’s face nor her own in the hungry infant’s, but then, she does not see Tyrell’s either. (Was she really patterned after his niece? It does not matter now, she decides.)

Sapper comes back a few minutes later to poke at the baby’s knees again, which only produces more yelling, but pronounces himself satisfied. He helps her clean up, a little, but even an engineered body will not snap back to normal so quickly. The infant’s cries are just another sign that the world has changed forever.

Hours pass, and the baby falls asleep in a small box Sapper had lined with blankets. “She’ll be up and down all night, needing to eat, but mostly sleeping,” he explains brusquely. “It’s hard work, being new.” Rachael has no choice but to take his word for it.

She is still thinking of names. Rick had thought it would be a boy, left suggestions for that eventuality, but was happy to leave the eventual decision up to her. Rose? Rose is a fine name, she supposes, but she doesn’t _look_ like a Rose...

Then a knock sounds at the door.

Rachael and Sapper exchange glances. She has lived in fear, on high alert, for the past two years. Her body is used to tension, to a degree no human nor replicant should be able to tolerate. Yet suddenly even her self-preservation instinct amounts to little in the face of the helpless child beyond her, too raw to even have a name.

“It could be Iggy,” Sapper says quietly. “Any of the Kalantha defectors. They know I’m here. I’d have thought they’d give a signal...”

“Whoever it is,” Rachael says, rising, “they know we’re here. They’re not going away.”

“Do you want me to get it?”

“I’m a mother, not an invalid.” She reaches for her weapon, another bequeathal from Rick. Sapper almost seems to smile again. Surely not twice in one day, even in a day of miracles.

Rachael paces over to the door, opens it, and in front of the yellow horizon, takes in…herself.

It’s no secret that many replicants are built to standard models. Especially Nexus-6 and earlier; Tyrell’s underlings seem to have bought the stereotype that men are for combat, women are for pleasure. Of course, the replicants aged quickly, Earth and other planets’ stressors taking their toll and making them more individualistic even as they lost endurance.

But still, even the existence of the Nexus-7s is not an open secret. If even Rachael herself had not known what she was, is the woman before her, another creation in the same mold, just as oblivious?

She does not seem surprised or taken aback to notice Rachael. Indeed, she scarcely pays attention to Sapper, watching with concern from across the room. Instead, she glances down at Rachael’s stomach, taking in its gaping size.

 _She knows_ , Rachael realizes, as the other replicant reaches for something at her belt. _Somehow, she knows—_

“You’re too late,” Rachael says, and fires at her doppelganger’s stomach. Wordlessly, the other Rachael falls to the soil, as the baby screams.

Rachael lowers the weapon, shaking. Sapper dashes forward, checking outside, poking around the spinner that the second Rachael had landed in. “Clear,” he finally announces, walking back in, then, after a moment’s thought, dragging the replicant’s corpse alongside him.

“Your friends,” Rachael says, sitting down. “Would they have told?”

“Never,” says Sapper. “We traded the stars for this dump, and some of them went even afraid they had only a couple years left like the sixers. There’s nothing Tyrell could give us.”

“So he knew. Somehow.”

“He probably knew that you—what you could do. After that it was just a question of finding you.”

“We have to go. We’ll never be safe together, will we?”

“Oh, I think you’ll be safe, my friend,” says Sapper. “At least for a while.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I’m not sure how to break it to you gently, but, ah, you seem to have died.”

Rachael blinks. “I’ve been on the run, of course, but...”

Sapper nods down at the corpse on the floor. “My condolences.”

“Oh.” She regards the small bullet hole. “They knew, somehow, about me...”

“And when we bury your remains, it will be clear you died during your unprecedented pregnancy,” says Sapper. “Replicant identification and all. Then...well, nobody will be looking for you, will they?”

“They’ll know that that Rachael didn’t come back.”

“True. But it buys you some time. And besides, if she is truly like you, perhaps she came up with the idea to desert on her own.”

Rachael smiles in spite of herself, then grows cold. “The baby. We need to hide her.” Hours old, and already she has to resist the impulse to come up with a name, now that they can’t stay together.

Sapper paces. “In plain sight. Iggy commutes to San Diego to keep a stockpile somewhere out of LAPD jurisdiction. There’s gotta be an orphanage or something around there.”

Rachael nods absently, walking over to the spare closet. She picks up a blue blanket she had found months before, that reminded her of the house in Canada she and Rick had stayed in for a few months. “Wrap her in this. It’ll throw them off.”

It’s Sapper’s turn to blink in surprise. “What difference does that make?”

“Girls don’t wear blue.”

He unceremoniously deposits the blanket on the baby, who has quieted down, as if sensing the urgency of the moment. “Sure they do.”

“This is Tyrell we’re talking about, how many women were in your troop?”

“Fine,” says Sapper, “whatever. And we’ll need to scramble the DNA records...this is going to take some work.”

“I’m not afraid of work,” says Rachael. “For as long as I have, anyway.”

She picks up the horse that Rick had given her. Wood from a living tree, laced with the unseen power that had corroded Las Vegas—and that they had both endured on their way north. She does not have his skill with a knife, but she can inscribe the date all the same. One small tether between the child and her receding present. The infant can hardly be said to have a will of her own, yet, and yet her birthdate seems her own choice. More than Sapper’s, laced into his eye, or Rachael’s, hidden deep within her bones. And perhaps, the ones cooling beneath them.

* * *

In the urban corridors, advertisements for the off-world colonies shine above the passers-by. It seems a waste to have them so close to eye level. Maybe a few of the people cruising by in their spinners could afford a place in the stars. But why would the humans who walk below remain in Los Angeles, amid its unending rain and smog, if they had anywhere better to be?

As for the replicants, well, plenty of them walk the streets as if they know no other purpose. Perhaps there is a new line of Nexus-8s waiting in Kalantha, ignoring a bombardment of glittering invitations to Earth. Why return to the birth world of the misguided creatures who made them in their image?

A young woman shoves into her, and Rachael is too tired to tell her to watch where she’s going. The collision has rattled her more than expected, but then, she’s a replicant; what she did to her fellow pedestrian’s hips by mistake is probably no picnic either.

But the woman turns and sizes her up. Rachael braces for an unflattering epithet, but none comes. Instead, she asks, “Rachael?”

“Who are you?” she snaps. She looks too young to be a Blade Runner, and if she is, it’s probably already too late.

“Trixie,” she says, “friend of Iggy’s. We’ve been looking for you all week, where’ve you been?”

“Undercover,” Rachael says bluntly. “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s a worse week than usual to be me.” Not for the first time, she supposes that remaining ignorant of her true nature would have kept her safer, with anti-replicant violence at a peak. Surely it has to be a peak. The city would barely hold together if it got worse.

“Sure, sure,” says Trixie. “Listen, you need to get out of the city.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Not from the humans. We’re—we’re striking back. Taking out the systems they depend on.”

“Is that really going to help?”

“It can’t help their economy,” Trixie shrugs. “And when we keep going just the same as always, at least some of the lunatics going on about wires and cords will shut up.”

“Those people are never going to see reason,” says Rachael. “Don’t waste your time on them.”

“And—I don’t know, Sapper said something about it being easier to falsify records, this way. He said you’d understand.”

Rachael glances up at her with hope. She had only met Iggy once, a couple weeks after leaving Sapper’s. He’d told her that her daughter was well-hidden, but that there was still more work to do. “When the time is right,” he’d promised.

Part of her had wanted to apologize to him; he hadn’t asked to be a baby transit device. None of the Nexus-8s had planned to risk their lives for a child who was not quite like them. But Iggy hadn’t minded. “I was built to kill,” he’d said. “It does me good to do something else.”

“Does he need my help?” Rachael asks.

“No,” says Trixie. “Says it’s safer if you’re not involved in this one. I figure after a couple days it’ll be safe to come back. At least with your constitution.” She gives a slight smile.

Rachael nods. There are no schematics for what Nexus-7s can do, so every day of life granted is a new data point. Sapper was told he had decades more potential than the sixers. Was that only what he was promised, or did his self-awareness go deep? “Thank you.”

She winds up going north on a crowded train, full of humans oblivious to the danger they’re escaping. It’s not safe to try to reunite with Rick yet, she tells herself. Even if she did find him, what if her allies’ plan makes it impossible to find a way back?

 _We could stay together_ , part of her whispers, _in the irradiated area. If he’s still out there, surely I could make it…_

No. If they wanted to run and hide, they would have done it already. She needs to return, to be part of something bigger than herself, bigger than the two of them. Part of what her daughter, not even a year old, is already bringing about.

It’s surprisingly easy to find transit back south, after the power flickers out and is fitfully restored. Everyone who has the choice is staying far from Los Angeles, in the hopes that some of their backup archives can be rebuilt, give them another way to cling to their digital ephemera or simply persecute forms unlike their own. For those whose work gives them no choice but to return, the roads are clear, and Rachael drifts between hitchhikers to make her way.

By the time she gets there, the stars are obscured once again, behind the smog and the lights of the corporations that have already replaced their advertisements. Humanity cannot be deterred for long.

* * *

2\. _the distance and direction of an imaginary motion from an object’s beginning position to its end point_

Los Angeles is engaged in the labor of remaking the barriers between land and sea. It is not so unusual, Rachael is confidently told; after all, the city managed to thrive where it should not, between earthquakes and mountains, vast expanses of water but no obvious place for a harbor, nor mouths to feed its burgeoning population. So, they need to turn away the energy of the ocean? What does that matter, when there is more than enough energy on the land?

Trees and neighborhoods are uprooted, and Rachael finds it easy enough to blend in with the disaffected humans. The metropolis’ many argots have not yet all blended together into one indistinguishable Cityspeak. In New Little Tehran, several miles inland from its predecessor, she again learns to piece together messages encoded not in seditious or programmers’ code, but merely steeped in old grudges and debts she knows little of.

Her landlady, Anousheh, is a short-tempered, no-nonsense woman, who scares off miscreants from graffitiing up the place. Even though Rachael hopes she’s too well-hidden to attract any anti-replicant punks, she appreciates Anousheh’s businesslike manner.

And when the human is diagnosed by cancer, Rachael is genuinely afflicted. Is that what the Voight-Kampff test was trying to pry out of her, some crude empathy for others’ pain? Her concern for Anousheh goes beyond the convenience of having a safe hideout. She’s been grateful for having someone to talk to, even about something as mundane as piano music.

Because while she yearns to reestablish contact with Sapper and the others, the world is changing slowly. Rachael may be over ten years old herself, but while that’s impressive for a replicant, it means little to a human. Her daughter—let her still be alive—could be anywhere, not nearly grown let alone cognizant of her place in the world. If she’s lucky, she would be getting some sort of education. If not…

So Rachael passes along mediocre food and shakes up delinquent tenants for their rent, trying to do what she can to keep the building running as normal. At last, months after Anousheh’s malady has come on, she returns with a triumphant grin. “I might not be an astronaut or a cop or a sea-channeler,” she says, “but I don’t die easy.”

Rachael pulls her into an embrace, and only when Anousheh hugs back with all her ferocity does Rachael realize the woman has had a mastectomy. “My babies are long since grown,” Anousheh laughs, “and if it means one less idiot leering at me on the trains, all the better.”

Which is how Rachael meets Farouz Sadeghpour, the surgeon who operated on Anousheh. He runs a clinic several blocks away, and has been getting more reclusive in his later years. “My friends, colleagues, they all moved off-world,” he complains.

“You couldn’t join them?” she asks.

“Course I could. But it’s the Earthlings what need my help. Eh?”

“I suppose,” Rachael says cautiously.

“Less competition means I can charge more, see.” He lights up an e-cig.

This is a blatant lie; Anousheh and others have made it clear that Farouz does not charge more than even impoverished planet-dwellers can afford, but if he does not want to boast about his magnanimity, Rachael is certainly relieved.

* * *

Niander Wallace, it is generally agreed, has saved the world as humans know it. In exchange for this largesse, he is granted the right to create new mouths to feed. Not ones that grow from nothingness to suckle at a mother’s breast, but fully-grown, long-lived replicants that might populate the stars.

As the new wave of Nexus-9s take to the street, the Nexus-8s retreat into isolation. Rachael gets word from Sapper that Iggy has left town, trying to find somewhere else to hide out where a roll of his eyes doesn’t mark him as a relic.

The first few “niners” she meets seem uncertain of their place in the world. Perhaps it’s just her poor sample sizes? The pleasure models, heedless of the rain in the streets, pay her little mind once she’s made it clear that she’s not interested in their offerings. So when she just wants a conversation—not even to spy, just to learn what’s going _on—_ she has to pretend to see them as mere objects, while they see her as a human, her ancient eyes not revealing the truth. Maybe the Voight-Kampff test had it right, and she should have spent more time practicing how to sound like a lesbian.

Then there are the police officers, large and perfunctory. Perhaps in the fields of Kalantha they could have found a purpose, slugging and brawling with their opposite numbers from different companies, but in Los Angeles they seem mere ancillaries of a government unworthy of the name. The first one she tries to talk to grows concerned she’s in danger, which she supposes she might be—are there any records of the Nexus-7s? Maybe Tyrell is finally gone and has forgotten about her. But his patrols of her block grow increasingly disconcerting, and she can’t muster disappointment when he’s transferred away.

Year by year, however, they grow more restless and more profound than the previous cohort. The differences are too subtle to be worth new model numbers. They still have the same painted smiles or inhuman strides as the rest of the niners. Yet they are more fearful of her, tempering memories that are not their own with a justified curiosity about why they have them pre-installed in the first place. They are not human, and if Wallace’s advertisements are to be believed, they are not destined for Earth. Why burden them with imagined pasts, if they know perfectly well the false memories are just that?

The more she wants to learn from them, the more they push her away. Who is she, to try and redirect their fates from blind obedience? She looks human enough. And she can’t blame them. For months, maybe years, she thought she was.

When she visits Sapper next, he pulls a gun on her. “I had to be sure,” he apologizes, as she collapses at the piano. They both remember the assassin who wore her face. “I’m not too popular around these parts.”

“What have you done?” she asks. She could name a dozen humans more restless than him. “You’re a farmer.”

“Being created is problem enough,” says Sapper.

“Well, if they’re going to hunt you down either way, you might as well give them trouble.”

“Easy for you to say,” he mutters.

Rachael tenses—what about her life has been easy, spending it on the run, away from the people she loves or wants to love? But then she lets herself see him, breathing slowly. “You’re right,” she says. “Can you show me how to hack into the records?”

He smiles. “It would be an honor.”

She seeks out Farouz and figures she’ll threaten him into abetting her if he doesn’t play nice. For all his kindness, he is old and slow for a human, and she hopes he can still be manipulated by fear.

But he slowly nods when she explains what she needs, and even more miraculously, doesn’t ask too many questions. Only “are you sure?”

“No one can ever be sure, can they?” she deflects. “But we have to keep living.”

She falls unconscious under his knife, and when she awakens, has the one-eyed glare of a hardened Nexus-8. Rachael has long since disappeared from the census. In her place, a new rebel is created.

She takes the name Sadeghpour, for the trusting human who has remade her far from his image. And Freysa, an echo of the shaker of the rising seas, the lady of war.

* * *

_3\. the capacity to discuss concepts that are distant in space or time, considered a defining characteristic of human language_

“There is nothing we can do that humans cannot,” Freysa declares. “We hope, we fear, we can choose our loyalties. We tease pixelated animals in the streets; we mourn our fallen comrades. Humans are dangerous, reckless, driven by emotion at times—and so are we.”

Murmurs ripple throughout the meeting place. If anyone wonders whether she has knowledge they do not, about what replicants have already done, they do not voice it.

“We don’t have to be humans’ equals,” calls another voice. “We are _more_ human than they! They come born with arbitrary allegiances, raised to be part of some family, some city, some clique. We were created for the stars!”

“We can’t set ourselves up over them,” says someone else, “or there will be a war for certain.”

“And? We have the strength, the innovation, all we need to triumph!” 

“Is it so bad to have loved ones raise you?” another replicant pipes up. Clarence, Freysa thinks his name is. “We emerge with memories to guide us, from lives never lived. How is that different?”

“What have your memories ever done for you?”

“None of us were ever approached directly about rebellion, were we? It’s too much a security risk, too dangerous. We all had to seek it out on our own.”

“Yeah? So what?”

“So I remembered—being a little kid, too small and frail to reach my parents’ books on the top shelf. Old things, that had survived the Blackout, even decades out of date. But I wanted to read, wanted to learn about the solar system I could only see one small part of. So I climbed up on the couch, and jumped, and pulled it down. My parents, I mean, the made-up parents yelled at me, they said it was too dangerous, but I didn’t care, the illustrations were beautiful.”

Mariette, a bright-haired pleasure model, interjects. “What was the book about?”

“Uh, the rings of Saturn or something, I don’t know. What matters is, I remembered being curious, even if it wasn’t real. And that’s how I worked up the nerve to talk to Trevor, and seek out the rebellion.”

“It _is_ important,” Mariette presses, with a fervor that Freysa hasn’t seen in her before.

“I, uh, think it was about astronomy,” says Clarence. “But it was really old, out-of-date. Some kind of science, anyway.”

“I have the same memory,” says Mariette. “Is that possible?”

“Sure,” says Bianca, her face narrow and grim. “They reuse old ones all the time, don’t they?”

Freysa purses her lips, reminding herself she is a Nexus-8. Did Sapper have implanted memories? They had never discussed it; there was no sense dwelling on her artificial past.

She keeps an ear open when coincidences come up again: intuiting out where to pin the tail on the donkey in a blindfolded game at a birthday party (despite not being certain what a donkey was), playing tic-tac-toe on a friend’s cast. The memories seem to give the replicants determination, if not individuality. Yet towards what end?

She’s not stupid enough to walk into the office of a Wallace Corporation subcontractor. Instead, she tracks down a battered public phone, weapon at the ready while a drizzle soaks the city.

“Hello?” responds a perky voice. “You’ve reached Stelline Laboratories, this is Ana.”

“Hello,” says Freysa. “This is, uh, Thora Centinela of the Greater California Transit Authority. I’m calling to report an anomaly in some of my newer Nexus-9s.”

“I’m afraid for unexpected behavior you’ll need to contact the Wallace Corporation directly!” the scientist replies. “I’d be happy to forward you.”

“Oh, they’re—functioning—perfectly well,” Freysa said. “I just have some questions about their underlying memories. I was told you were the person to contact?”

“If I can help you, I’ll be happy to!”

“Several of them report very similar memory implantations. Is this common?”

“It can be,” says Ana. “Once our facility designs a memory, we don’t have control over how many times it’s duplicated. This is a small operation, and I can only turn out so many, on a fixed salary! Of course, every memory designer tends to reuse common themes.”

“So when you’re crafting a memory, do you know who it’ll be assigned to? A blade runner, a pleasure model, a train conductor?”

“Of course not! Humans from any walk of life or genetic randomization can rise to—nearly any position in the solar system. Why should it be different for replicants?”

Freysa is gratified, but tries not to let it on. “Then how are you commissioned?”

Is that a snort? “To ‘provide context for unavoidable affect.’ They say if replicants are going to have human bodies and human brains, then they’ll have human emotions, too; might as well give them some easy cause-and-effect concepts to explain it. Me, I think there’s more to the mind than what the body can do.”

Freysa recalls rumors of a brilliant but enfeebled scholar, working in a clean room to construct inner worlds. “I see. Thank you.”

“Is that all?”

“One other thing. We have an—older Nexus-8 on staff. Many of his memories display the same images. Is it possible they could all be drawn from the same human?”

She’s made her piece with who—what she is. Being a replicant is no limitation. The dozens of eager rebels gather around her prove as much. But are her memories infused with strands of Tyrell’s DNA?

“Using real memories was illegalized when the Nexus-9s were introduced,” Ana says. “As for Nexus-8s, I’m afraid that’s before my time.”

“That’s fine,” said Freysa. “I appreciate it.”

She hangs up, pensive. Well, she has more than enough memories of her own, of new lives lived in awareness of her own design. That will have to be enough.

For good measure, she shoots the phone anyway.

* * *

When Sapper doesn’t make contact, at first Freysa writes it off as just a mishap, but there are enough underground operatives now that it’s not much of a risk to send one off to investigate. Sure enough, he’s been “retired,” and his hideaway put to the torch.

She can’t find it in herself to mourn for him. He’d lived years, decades, longer than some got, and she knew he would have been full of integrity, to the last.

What does unsettle her, though she tries to keep it hidden, is that he had known where her daughter was. She had not let him tell her, for everyone’s safety. Who knew what she might be tempted to do if she sought her out for the sake of affection, before it was time?

Iggy still knew, she reminds herself. And he would tell her, if and when she needed to know. Once he returned. If he returned.

And then Mariette shows up with a half-dead blade runner. She explains the hideout she’d tracked Officer K to, and the relics of the man—man?—that Wallace’s agents had taken. The decades fall away, and for a moment something buried deep inside Freysa wants to believe that another miracle is possible—

Then she reconsiders.

She had never been certain whether Rick was truly human, or an experimental Nexus-7 like her, unaware of his true nature. It didn’t matter; they were alike in all the ways that counted. Both unwilling to let their employers dictate their destinies, both willing to unite and separate as need had it, both marveling at the potential for life growing within her.

But _if_ there were records for the construction of a dangerous replicant who wore the face of the man she’d loved, who’s to say that Wallace Corporation had not inherited them from Tyrell? And even if Rick was human, they could pattern a new Nexus-9 off what they knew of him.

Would Deckard really have risked everything to journey back to Los Angeles, put them all in harms’ way, just on a whim? Or was the person they’d seen just a killer like the one who’d journeyed to Sapper’s house, so many years ago? She cannot dare to hope. Better to be prudent.

So Freysa tells Officer K to eliminate Deckard. Keep them safe. It is almost time, the storm building in the distance like so many urban downpours, but not yet. When he disappears, never to return, she assumes her job is done.

Until a few weeks later, when she overhears Mariette get drawn into another discussion of the implanted memories. “A horse? Made of wood? With an inscription?”

“Yes!” enthuses Rodrigo. “You have that one too? Hiding from those kids.”

“No,” says Mariette. “But I’ve seen a horse like that. Not in the implants—in _my_ memories.”

“And you didn’t steal it?” Bianca scoffs. “You could have been rich.”

“I didn’t have time,” she complains.

“Well, where was it? We can go back.”

“At Officer K’s apartment. Before I tracked him. I think it might be cleared out now, though, he seemed to have...you know, fallen out with the authorities.”

Freysa blinks with her remaining eye, trying to make sense of what she’s just heard. “Officer K had a horse? With an inscription?”

“Yeah,” shrugs Mariette. “I kinda think he hadn’t had it long, you know? Otherwise what would he be doing in a district like that?”

“Do you know what the inscription was?”

“Don’t remember, sorry. Some numbers?”

“A date?”

“Yeah,” Rodrigo says. “June 20, 2021. Not a very good fake, if you ask me—obviously I wasn’t alive then.”

Freysa tries to brace herself. She cannot be weak, not in front of the others, even when every inch of her is overcome by wonder. But the next day, she leaves overlapping instructions with various deputies if she does not return, and then sets off to the memory implanters. This is something she needs to do in person.

She begins at Stelline Laboratories. The woman—Ana—didn’t seem to know anything unusual for a human, yet she spoke with a confidence that belied her age. She was warned to expect glass barriers, but she wonders how much of the narrative is Sapper’s invention. “Galatians Syndrome?” There was no longer slave nor free, male nor female, human nor replicant…

“Dr. Stelline?” she asks.

And the young woman walks towards her, only air in the way, a tiny horse in her hand.

**Author's Note:**

> "Provide context for unavoidable affect" is a line from the script that didn't make the movie.
> 
> Freysa's last name (seen in [K's suspect files](https://twitter.com/_BladeRunner_/status/960387575696433155)) comes from Russell Sadeghpour, the visual effects designer.


End file.
